A telling moment has revealed the path Trump is on, and it’s scary

If you heard the news last week that Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the United States’ Bureau of Labor Statistics, and responded with a shrug, you probably weren’t alone. Wasn’t this just another instance of the United States president attacking someone whose findings he didn’t like?

Not according to experts from across the political aisle, who have raised the alarm that this move represents a different threat altogether. Even from Trump. Speaking with host Samantha Selinger-Morris on The Morning Edition podcast, our international and political editor Peter Hartcher talks about what history tells us happens once a country’s leader starts controlling facts.

Click the player or watch the video below to listen to the full episode, or read on for an edited extract of the conversation.

Selinger-Morris: We know, certainly I know now more than I did before, after reading your column, that reliable statistics are absolutely crucial to democracy, right? So walk us through this. Why so?

Hartcher: Well, there are the specifics, like what should interest rates be set at, but the much bigger picture and why this is such a telling moment, I think, is that if you have agreed points of reality, if you can agree on some official data, then you have a starting point and perhaps even an ending point for debate and policy.

But if nothing is fixed, nothing is agreed and everything is subject to political manipulation, which presumably everybody will now suspect the numbers in future will be because Trump will no doubt appoint eventually a politically reliable, trustworthy figure to run this bureau… so even if that person does the job honestly and punctiliously, there will forever now be a suspicion over the numbers produced by that bureau.

Now there will be compensating. Things will happen. Private sector outfits will try to produce their own estimates, that’s exactly what happened in China when the Chinese government was plainly fudging their figures to make growth look better than it was. And in fact, it was the former premier of China, Li Keqiang, who said, “Oh, don’t worry about the GDP figures”. He said, “They’re man-made.” And he himself proposed an alternative formula for trying to measure... growth in the Chinese economy while ignoring the official statistics. And he became the premier.

So this is a well-established pattern in autocratic societies. It’s not in the US. That’s why it’s a big story, because it’s part of the tendency of the Trump administration to drive the US into an autocratic mindset and political system, depriving the country of objective reality and objective facts so that everything can then be subject to manipulation and redefinition by the leader, who in an autocratic system becomes the only source of reality. He’s not there yet. He’s a long way from that. But that’s the course he’s on. This is a real marking point, I think. And he still has nearly three and a half years to go.

Selinger-Morris: I was reading the commentary about Trump’s latest firing, and one of the examples that The New York Times, at least, gave was that in the former Soviet Union under Stalin, the Soviet census official was arrested and executed when his population count came in lower than Stalin had announced. So we know that these can get to really dark places. And I guess my question is, do you have any sense of how the American people are feeling about it?

Hartcher: In isolation, it’s taken days before even the most serious American press has started to analyse and ruminate on the deeper implications of this, for big investors and economists to start saying, “Well, hold on. What are we going to do for reliable information?”

The ordinary people are generally too preoccupied with their daily tasks and needs to be politically engaged enough to fully care about the sacking of just one more person. I mean, most people struggle to keep their own jobs or look for jobs, which was the point of the jobs number over which she was fired, right? That the jobs market was at its weakest in five years...

Trump could have seized on that turned around and said, “Look, I’ve been vindicated. Jay Powell has held rates too high too long. He’s killing the economy. He’s killing the jobs market. Everybody’s suffering. I’m going to appoint a credible central bank governor, Federal Reserve Chair, as they call it, in their system, and we’re going to deal with this problem.”

Instead of targeting the economic player, he targeted the economic narrator, the person who produces the statistics. Because, to my mind, this shows us his priority. It’s more important to control the narrative and his definition of facts than it is to control the actual economic outcome. So I thought that was a telling moment, where it shows you the all important value he places on narrative and on being the sole definer of facts.

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